The Believers

by Zoe Heller

  Audrey smacked the table. “Of course it was her! Where else would they get that shit about pressing charges? And what fucking nurse is ever going to describe Berenice as a ‘young lovely’?”

  Jean thought for a moment. “No, she just couldn’t have, Audrey. It’s such an awful, cheap thing to do.”

  Audrey gazed up at the ceiling long-sufferingly. “Oh, I know, and Berenice would never do anything cheap, would she?”

  Mike came to the table now, carrying a cup of tea. “Have you heard?” he asked Karla eagerly. Karla gave a chilly nod.

  “But why would she go to all that trouble to get a few lines printed in a silly gossip rag?” Jean asked. “It’s not as if anyone we know reads this stuff—”

  “Are you kidding?” Audrey cried. “Everyone reads this stuff! And, believe me, this isn’t the end of it. This is just her warming up. She’s probably selling her story to some paper as we speak.”

  Mike tapped Karla’s shoulder. “I found it,” he whispered.

  “Sorry?” she said.

  “I was the one who found it—you know, the item.”

  She stared at him. “What…and you showed it to her?”

  “Of course. She needed to know.”

  Karla considered her mother’s haggard face. For years, it seemed to her, she had been carrying within her a tiny bud of contempt for her husband and now, quite suddenly, it was blossoming. She could see it in her mind’s eye—unfurling its terrible scarlet petals, like a flower in time-lapse photography. “You shouldn’t have done that, Mike,” she said quietly.

  He gave a nervous bark of laughter. “Don’t be silly, Karl. I was looking out for her. If there’s something written about her in the paper, she has a right to see it.”

  “No,” Karla said, shaking her head. “It was a cruel thing to do.” She glanced at Jean and Audrey, who had fallen silent. “Let’s not discuss it now.”

  “She was going to find out about it some time,” Mike muttered.

  Karla stood up. “I’m going back upstairs now, Mom.”

  Mike pursued her to the elevator. “What’s up with you?” he demanded. “I was only trying—”

  Karla shook her head. “Not now, Mike. This isn’t the time.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Don’t blame the messenger.”

  The doors of the elevator opened, and they stepped in.

  “Hey!” he said as they began to ascend. “Have you seen the exit polls?”

  Karla gazed stolidly at the floor numbers lighting up on the panel. “No, Mike, I haven’t seen the exit polls. I’ve been here all day.”

  “Well, yeah, I know that, but I thought you might have seen a TV…” He paused. “Anyway, it looks like it’s going to be a landslide.”

  The elevator stopped at the ground floor. Karla stepped to one side. “Mike, I think you should go home.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Karla put her foot out to stop the elevator doors from closing. “I think you should leave.”

  “What’s going on, Karla? Is this about the thing in the Post?”

  “No. I don’t know. I just don’t want you here right now.”

  The elevator doors kept sliding back and forth, slamming up against Karla’s foot.

  “You’re being crazy, Karla. I haven’t even seen your dad yet.”

  “Please, Mike.”

  “I have a right to see him, you know. He is my father-in-law.”

  Karla grabbed him by his sweater and pulled him toward the door. “Just go!”

  A middle-aged couple and their teenage daughter walked into the elevator.

  The daughter goggled at Karla and Mike, smelling the fury in the air and hungry to witness some adult discord.

  With ostentatious dignity, Mike rearranged his mussed sweater. “Fine!” he said, in a low voice. “I’m going.”

  The family stayed at the hospital that night. Karla and Rosa and Lenny bedded down in the reception area. Audrey was given a cot in Joel’s room. She lay awake for several hours, listening to the wheeze of Joel’s respirator, trying to picture the events of the coming days. From time to time over the years, she had daydreamed about Joel’s funeral. Always in these guilty fantasies, the event—a gorgeously solemn affair, held somewhere outrageous like Alice Tully Hall or the old C.P. Headquarters on Twenty-sixth Street—had functioned as a thundering endorsement of her marital career, the apotheosis of her life as consort to a great man. She had envisaged herself wearing red, staggering the other mourners with her quiet dignity and the strength with which she bore the enormity of her loss. Now it was impossible to imagine the occasion as anything other than a ceremonial humiliation, an elaborate joke against her, hovered over by the presiding spirit of Berenice.

  She did sleep, finally. But only briefly. Somewhere around two o’clock in the morning, she woke up again in a panic, convinced that Joel had died. She went over and put her ear to his chest. No—his heart was still booming away. That heart! Everything else was shutting down, but still it kept going, the last, tactless guest at the party, unwilling to accept that the revels were over. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her husband’s ravaged face. In recent days, his color had changed from a rather beautiful candle-white to the yellow-gray of weathered teak. He was so gaunt now that she could trace every jutting line and curvature of the skull beneath his skin.

  She got up and wandered out into the hall. In the waiting room, Lenny and Rosa were sprawled, head to toe, on the sofa, fast asleep. Over in a corner, Karla was sitting in a chair, rummaging blindly in a bag of tortilla chips.

  “Midnight feast, is it?” Audrey said.

  Karla jumped. “God, Mom, you scared me.”

  “What flavor are those chips?”

  Karla stood up. “Ssh. Wait, I’ll come out.” She emerged blinking into the bright light of the corridor. “They’re lime.”

  “Ooh, goody. Give us one, then.” Audrey took the bag from Karla and sat down on the floor, leaning against the wall. “What?” she said, registering Karla’s shocked expression. “I’m allowed to treat myself sometimes, you know.”

  Karla sat down next to her. They both took large handfuls of chips from the bag.

  “So, is Mike coming back tomorrow?” Audrey asked.

  Karla shrugged. “I guess.”

  “Is something going on with you two? You seemed very snippy with each other, before.”

  “No. Everything’s okay.”

  Audrey ate some more chips. “These are delicious.”

  Karla smiled. “Eighty calories a serving, though.”

  “Oh, that’s not so bad…. How much is a serving?”

  “Ten chips.”

  Audrey’s eyes widened. “Fuck that, take them away from me,” she said, holding out the bag.

  Karla laughed and took them.

  “So, about you and Mike,” Audrey said.

  “We’re fine, Mom.”

  “Good, good,” Audrey nodded. “Because…”

  “Excuse me, ladies,” a voice said. “You’re not allowed to sit in the corridor.”

  They looked up to see a nurse coming down the corridor toward them.

  “All right,” Audrey said, “we’ll get up in a sec.”

  “I need you to get up now, if you don’t mind,” the nurse persisted.

  Karla made to stand up, but Audrey placed a restraining hand on her leg. “I do mind, as it happens,” she said. “I’m in the middle of a conversation with my daughter.”

  The nurse shivered in affront. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but it’s a safety hazard to have people sitting in the corridor.”

  Audrey cocked her head. “I said I’d get up in a second. Now piss off, would you?”

  Two bright patches of red appeared at the nurse’s temples. She stared furiously at Audrey for a moment and then walked off quickly down the corridor.

  “Stupid cow,” Audrey said. “What’s she going to do, call the police?”

  “Perhaps we should get up, Mom.”

>   “No, I was going to say something.”

  “What?”

  “I was going to say, if things weren’t good with you and Mike, I wouldn’t want you to think you had to stick at it.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, if you were really unhappy.”

  “I don’t understand, Mom.”

  Audrey tutted impatiently. “Yes, you do.”

  There was a long silence. “But you stayed,” Karla said at last. “You put up with—”

  “That was completely different,” Audrey said quickly. “I was happy.”

  They looked up at the sound of footsteps coming down the corridor. The nurse was returning.

  “All right, all right,” Audrey said. “We’re going.”

  “Are you Mrs. Litvinoff?” the nurse said.

  “Yeah, why? You going to report me?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Litvinoff.” The nurse clasped her hands piously. “Your husband just passed.”

  Karla stayed behind to wake up Lenny and Rosa. When they arrived in Joel’s room a few minutes later, they found Audrey lying on the bed, rocking Joel in her arms. No one spoke. It was inconceivable that Audrey would accept their efforts to console her, and there was no room here for their own grief. They stood for a few moments, watching their mother cry, and then one by one, they silently crept away.

  CHAPTER

  24

  “I’m not being funny or anything,” Audrey’s sister, Julie, said for the third time that morning, “but I do think it’s very odd the way she’s arranged things.” Julie and Colin were sitting in the back of a cab on their way to Joel’s memorial service. Jean, who had been delegated to chaperone them for the day, was sitting in the front passenger seat.

  “I suppose you know, Jean,” Julie went on, “that Col and I weren’t even invited to the burial?”

  “You did mention that, yes.”

  “We went to all this trouble to get here as soon as we could, and then we find out she’s already had him done. That’s not right, is it?”

  “Well,” Jean said, “it’s this thing today that’s the real event. This is the proper send-off.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still not the burial, is it?” Julie persisted. “Close family should go to the burial. And why’s she having this memorial whatsit in a cathedral anyway? Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t got anything against churches myself—Colin’s a Christian, you know—but you’d have thought Audrey, with all her principles and whatnot…”

  Jean glanced in the rearview mirror and smiled brightly. “I think it was one of the few places she could find that was big enough. They’re expecting a big turnout. And you know, the people at this place—the priests—they’re quite left-wing. They do a lot of work with the homeless and the poor and so on, so I think Audrey felt it wasn’t an altogether inappropriate location.”

  “I see,” Julie said, pursing her lips.

  They saw the police barriers as soon as the taxi turned the corner onto Amsterdam Avenue. There looked to be at least a thousand people lining the block: rappers, actors, politicians, prostitutes, mullahs, community activists, university professors, congressmen, homeless people, even a silver-haired mafioso or two. (Joel had once caused a great scandal in the left-wing community by defending a New York don against charges of racketeering.)

  “They’re not all here for Joel, are they?” Julie asked, peering through the window.

  “Oh, yes,” Jean said, pleased by the shock in Julie’s voice. She took her change from the cabdriver and opened the door. “Come on, then.”

  Julie hesitated. “It’s very…diverse, isn’t it?” she murmured.

  Inside the cathedral, another three thousand people were already seated. The front pews were filled, and Julie was appalled to discover that the best seating option available was twenty rows back. While she fulminated over this insult, Jean scanned the crowd for any sign of Berenice. Audrey had expressed no concern about the possibility of Berenice attending, but Jean harbored a nightmarish vision of the two of them running into each other on the cathedral steps. She was still gazing about her fretfully when twenty Native Americans in full ceremonial attire walked down the aisle to begin the obsequies with a drum circle.

  Audrey had arranged an impressive array of speakers and musical tributes. After the Native Americans had performed, Charlie Rangel, the congressman from Harlem, made a speech. Then Lauren Bacall read a sonnet by John Donne, and Patti Smith sang one of Joel’s favorite songs, “Horses.” (“Oh, my God!” Julie giggled when Patti Smith took the floor. “Don’t they sell hairbrushes round her way?”) Next, there were a series of testimonials from Joel’s pro bono clients. One woman spoke of how Joel had defended her against charges of panhandling. A homeless man described how Joel had visited him every day in prison for six months, while working to overturn his conviction on charges of aggravated assault. Jean was moved. Joel had been a good man, she thought. An old scoundrel in many ways—but a good man who had done good things.

  Toward the end of the service, Chuck D, whose former group, Public Enemy, Joel had defended against obscenity charges in the 1980s, performed the rap anthem “Fight the Power.” Then Audrey, wearing a black dress that Karla had purchased for her the day before from Loehmann’s, stood up and announced that she was going to say a few words.

  Jean glanced over to where Karla and Rosa and Lenny were sitting. She had been unaware that Audrey had any plans to speak, and from the looks on their faces, so had they. Audrey looked frail and very nervous as she climbed the little spiral of stairs to the pulpit, clutching a piece of paper in her hand. For one moment, both thrilling and terrifying, Jean wondered if she was going to make some sort of scene and publicly denounce Joel.

  “Joel’s chosen profession was the law,” Audrey began. “He was a lawyer. But to me, he was and will always be a warrior—a warrior who fought unrelentingly, all his life, for equality and justice. Over the last forty years it has been my great privilege to fight alongside him, and I can honestly say that there has not been a day in those forty years that Joel hasn’t made me laugh, hasn’t taught me something new, hasn’t made me proud to be his comrade. As I stand here now, it is hard for me—as I know it is for many of you—to imagine going on without him. But I know that Joel would not want me to be mournful today. I know that he would want me—would want us—to be looking to the future, to be thinking, even now, about how we can best continue the struggle. That is why, today, my children and I would like to announce that we are starting a foundation in Joel’s name. The Litvinoff Foundation. Through this foundation, we will build on Joel’s legacy by giving grants to progressive political and community initiatives that further the cause of social justice. In this way, we hope to keep moving forward to the truly equal and fair society that was Joel’s dream.”

  “Viva the revolution!” someone shouted, and the cathedral erupted in cheers.

  Jean looked at her friend’s pale face peeping over the lectern. So this was Audrey’s choice: to be the keeper of the flame, the guardian of the fable. Like the tired old priest who loses his faith, but cannot bring himself to disavow the church, she would hide whatever sacrilegious sentiments lurked in her heart and carry on the official forms of worship, regardless. From now on, until she died, she would burnish the myth of the Litvinoffs’ perfect union; she would fund-raise tirelessly for Joel’s “foundation,” attend conferences to accept posthumous awards on his behalf, and oversee the archiving of his papers. At some point, she would no doubt handpick an appropriately pliable young person to write his authorized biography.

  Jean stopped herself, aware of a priggish, censorious tone entering her thoughts. Who was she to say that Audrey was making the wrong choice? Or that this charade of reverent widowhood did not require its own sort of stoicism and courage?

  The applause was dying down. Audrey continued:

  “No one as uncompromising as Joel was in his fight for the poor, the disenfranchised, the victims of racism and inequity, could have lived h
is life without earning the hostility of the right-wing press. For many years, Joel has been one of the favorite bogeymen of the forces of reaction in this country. And I have no doubt that in the days to come, those forces will do their best to taint his legacy in any way they can. The family that Joel and I made together was not a conventional family in many ways. Joel always used to say that he didn’t really believe in families. He believed in tribes. But let me say for the record now, ours was a joyous tribe.”

  She paused.

  “I would like now to introduce you to a very special member of our tribe: my dear friend Berenice Mason, who is here today with her son—Joel’s son, our son—Jamil…. Berenice? Where are you? Please stand up.”

  A ripple of whispers ran through the cathedral. Jean, along with three thousand others, swiveled in her seat to see Berenice slowly rising from one of the back pews. She looked terrified. Out of the silence, a little boy’s voice said, “Why’s everybody looking at us, Mommy?” There was a great roar of laughter and applause.

  “What’s she talking about?” Julie hissed in Jean’s ear. “What is going on?”

  Audrey concluded her speech now by asking that everyone join her in singing “The Internationale,” the verses of which had been provided on the back of the programs. As the organ struck up the opening notes, she remained standing in the pulpit, staring out across the crowd, like Boadicea in her chariot.

  Arise ye workers from your slumbers

  Arise ye prisoners of want

  For reason in revolt now thunders

  And at last ends the age of cant.

  Away with all your superstitions

  Servile masses arise, arise

  We’ll change henceforth the old tradition

  And spurn the dust to win the prize.

  The post-memorial reception at Perry Street had been planned as a select affair for Joel’s closest friends and family, but by the time Jean arrived at the house, there were at least two hundred people crammed into the living room. Perspiring young men in black ties were weaving their way through the dense crowd, bearing platters of canapés. At the bar, people were struggling to retain a semblance of funereal dignity as they elbowed their way toward the vodka. Audrey’s revelation had energized the party, it seemed. There was an exhilaration in the air—a sense that something scandalous and possibly historic had just taken place. Berenice and Jamil, the event’s surprise star turn, were standing, looking slightly dazed, by the fireplace, surrounded by people clamoring to introduce themselves. Unable to spot Audrey anywhere, Jean wandered back out into the hall. Lenny, who was sitting on the stairs with Tanya, nodded at her sheepishly. Earlier in the week, he had announced his intention to stay on in New York for a while. The carpentry business had proven less interesting than he had hoped, it seemed. And besides, he had told Jean, he wanted to be “there” for his mother.